On Thursday, the USD/JPY traded sideways, as it was squeezed in between the combined resistance of the 55 and 100-hour simple moving averages at 111.80 and the support of a recently drawn ascending channel pattern.
The sideways trading was expected to continue throughout the day, as most market attention was on the Euro and the European Central Bank.
The Federal Reserve released the US FOMC Meeting Minutes last Wednesday. The Fed officials provided in-depth insights into the economic and financial conditions that influenced their vote on where to set interest rates.
"Almost all participants thought that it would be desirable to announce before too long a plan to stop reducing the Federal Reserve's asset holdings later this year. Such an announcement would provide more certainty about the process for completing the normalization of the size of the Federal Reserve's balance sheet," the document said.
US data on Friday might impact USD/JPY
On Thursday, all attention will be on the European Central Bank. The bank will publish its Main Refinancing Rate at 12:45 GMT and host a press conference at 13:30 GMT.
The rate announcement has become insignificant, as the ECB keeps their rate at 0.00%. Instead during the press conference the heads of the bank will reveal information about the ECB's asset buying program.
On Friday, Canada and the US will publish their monthly employment data sets. It has five important data sets impacting the USD/CAD. It is the most complicated one to work with, as each data set impacts the rate differently.
For more information watch the weekly calendar analysis stream on our YouTube channel.
USD/JPY short term daily review
During Wednesday's trading session, the 100-hour simple moving average resisted the rate to 111.50. On Thursday morning, the currency exchange rate appreciated towards the 55-hour simple moving average to be located at the 111.70 marks.In regards to the near-term future, most likely, the rate will move sideways due to a lack of any fundamental news during the day.
It is expected that the currency exchange rate will end today's trading session at the 111.60 level.
Hourly Chart
On the daily chart, the rate had no additional technical resistance.Namely, all of the daily simple moving averages were located below the currency exchange rate.
The 100 and 200-day SMAs were providing support to the pivot point at 111.45.
Daily chart
Trader open position volume on the Swiss Foreign Exchange remained short on Thursday, as 65% of the volume was short on USD/JPY.
Meanwhile, in the 100-pip range around the pair trader set up pending orders were set to sell. Namely, 58% of orders were short.
Note that traders had gone short even before the bounce off from the 112.00 level began. The open positions were most likely in the green on Thursday.